There used to be an orange grove next to my house. My elderly neighbors kept the grove going, and it kept them going. Every spring, the orange blossom scent that the bees and I loved permeated the neighborhood, pungent and green with a hint of honey.

oranges so sweet
sticky with raw juice, I let
the dog lick me clean

The blight crept in from nowhere and killed one of the trees, which looked like it had been suffocated by splotches of mold.

Poof. The orange grove next door disappeared.

The former trees were sad stumps under the expanding jungle that’s the default mode for vegetation in Florida.

yes, all things must pass
like periwinkles in fall
crushed by summer’s heel

The old man died at 93; and after that—maybe she was bedridden, maybe she was also a little loopy—we never saw his widow leave the dark green ranch house with the gaudy awnings. Until, of course, her final departure.

The son sold the lot to a developer, who dumped a pile of dirt on the tree stumps, laid sod on top of the dirt, called it a berm, and constructed two houses on it.

As a kid, I once bought some orange blossom perfume for my mother, thinking she’d adore the scent as much as I did.

Not so.

Mish (Eileen) Murphy

is Contributing Editor and emerita Assistant Poetry Editor for CulturalDaily.com, where she worked with Alexis Rhone Fancher (Poetry Editor). Mish teaches English/literature at Polk State College in Lakeland, Florida. A Pushcart nominee, she has two poetry collections published: Fortune Written on Wet Grass (2019) and Sex & Ketchup (2021); and a poetry chapbook: Evil Me (Blood Pudding Press, 2020).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Mish Murphy Digital Artworks

⚡ A Review of Mish Murphy’s Sex & Ketchup by Mark A. Murphy, editor of Poetica Review, in Cultural Daily (2 September 2021)

⚡ John Yamrus Reviews Evil Me by Mish (Eileen) Murphy in Cultural Daily (2 September 2020)

⚡ How to Write a Book Review in Ten Easy Steps (just kidding; it’s not always easy), a guest blog post by Eileen (Mish) Murphy in Trish Hopkinson’s A Selfish Poet (14 June 2020)

⚡ Fearless Poems about Sex and Power in Enter Here by Alexis Rhone Fancher, a book review by Eileen Murphy in Los Angeles Review of Books (30 November 2017)